


To Suffer for One's Art

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2019 [32]
Category: inFAMOUS: Second Son
Genre: Family, Gen, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Past Violence, Pre-Canon, Strong Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 06:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20719895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: Pre-Game. For once, it’s not (completely) Delsin’s fault.





	To Suffer for One's Art

It takes, literally, seven people to convince Reggie that Delsin didn’t start it.  
  
“You know, it really _hurts_ that you make these assumptions about me,” Delsin remarks as Reggie stands beside the hospital bed, arms crossed. “I thought you knew me better than that.”  
  
“I know you plenty well,” Reggie says flatly. “Which is why I _immediately_ assumed that your mouth wrote yet another check that your ass couldn’t cash.”  
  
Delsin pouts. “Excuse me? My ass cashes _plenty_ of the checks my mouth writes. Its bank account is pretty impressive.”  
  
Reggie covers his face with his hands, drags them down over his eyes, cheeks, chin. He is so hopelessly tired. “What happened, Del?”  
  
Delsin’s eyes roll to look at the ceiling. One pupil is smaller than the other- he has a concussion, two broken knuckles, a set of bruised ribs, and a kneecap bruised badly enough that he’ll be limping for at least a week. “_Well_,” He begins, “So I went to the city.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“And you know how cities are.”  
  
Reggie arches an eyebrow at that.  
  
Delsin elaborates: “You know: _Rough_.”  
  
Reggie snorts. “What a country-boy,” he says, maybe one of the most good-natured jabs he’s thrown at his little brother in… Four years, now? Hard to be good-natured when every one else at the Sheriff’s Department knows just how badly behaved his own brother is. Evidently Delsin doesn’t get- or maybe he just doesn’t _care_\- how embarrassing it is for a cop to have a family member that is _constantly_ getting arrested for stupid, petty things.  
  
(“So, what you’re saying is that you want me to go big or go home?”  
  
“God damn it, Delsin!”)  
  
“Yeah, okay, I’m a country-boy, whatever. But I was in Seattle, and I was just walking around town- What?”  
  
Reggie has fixed him with a dull, disbelieving look. “You were just walking around,” He says.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“_You_ were just _walking around._”  
  
Delsin flips him off. “Let me _finish_ and you’ll get it. Anyway, I was just walking around, and I saw this really beat-up patch of brick wall-”  
  
“There we go,” Reggie sighs.  
  
“Can I finish? Am I allowed to finish? The wall looked like crap, Reggie. Whoever did that graffiti was godawful at what they do and I’d like to knock their teeth in for the _insult_ they offered to professional taggers such as myself.”  
  
“Let me guess: You hunted him down, slapped him across the face with a white glove, and challenged him to a pistol duel at dawn?”  
  
“_No_,” Delsin says, moving to sit up straighter- suddenly he stops, wavering in place and reaching out to brace himself on the bed. Evidently that concussion’s rattling him badly enough that even sitting up straight in a hospital bed is giving him vertigo. “Whoa.”  
  
Reggie frowns. “You alright?”  
  
“Uh…” Delsin doesn’t respond for a few seconds, and Reggie’s blood-pressure skyrockets; having been a pseudo-parent to his little brother for so long, he’s developed all of the instincts that come with it, including the ones where you fly into a panic when the kid is hurt. And it’s much easier to feel bad knowing that this wasn’t totally Delsin’s fault.  
  
“You need me to get a nurse?”  
  
“…Nah.” Delsin slowly leans back so that his upper body is supported by the bed. It’s a little awkward, but it seems to fix whatever was happening in his head. “Nah, I’m good. It’s cool. Where was I?”  
  
“Brick wall with bad graffiti.”  
  
“Right. Naturally, I figured I would spruce it up a bit.”  
  
“Of course you did,” Reggie sighs, more to himself than Delsin.  
  
“I mean, I had a _perfect_ idea Reggie- you know people who get tattoos to cover up scars? That’s the sort of thing I was going for, make the crapfest on the wall into something you actually _want _to look at.”  
  
Reggie softens a little. While he may not approve of Delsin’s tagging, he appreciates his brother’s passion for his art; and even if he definitely _should not_ have decided to just, you know, start tagging a wall because he thought it looked ugly, Reggie is at least certain that anything Delsin did to improve the wall aesthetically probably would have been better than whatever was there before. “I’m sure you would have found a way to make it work, Del.”  
  
“Yeah, well, incidentally? Didn’t really get a chance. Because apparently there were these guys, these, uh… _Akurans?_ I think that’s what the big one said, he had a really thick accent. But anyway, I guess they’re a gang, and I guess that wall was on the side of a building they own, and they really didn’t like me tagging it.”  
  
“I imagine they didn’t.”  
  
“They did not. And one of them had a gun.”  
  
Reggie stiffens. “Yeah?”  
  
“Yeah. So I backed off- seriously, Reggie, I nope’d out of that situation so quick it wasn’t even funny. Problem was, they were already kinda mad at that point, and so even me backing down didn’t really fix it. They started pushing me, I did _not _push back because of the gun, and so, uh…” Delsin gestures to his body. “…Yeeeah. It was a rough time. I guess some people saw something and called the cops, and I woke up here.”  
  
Reggie’s first instinct as a big brother is to hunt down whoever did this and put them in the goddamn ground; his cop instinct says that he should tap into some of his friends at the Seattle Police Department and see if maybe they might be able to help out. If these people owned a building they shouldn’t be hard to find.  
  
He wants to beat the shit out of them, but realistically Reggie will probably end up settling for watching as they’re cuffed and thrown into a cell.  
  
“I’ll check some things out later,” He assures Delsin.  
  
“Going to interrogate a few more people, make sure I didn’t pull a knife on them?”  
  
“_No_,” Reggie says, ambling over to a chair and taking a seat. “Aside from the usual tagging, I can’t really say that you started this.”  
  
“I’m sorry, what?”  
  
“I said, I can’t really say that you started this.”  
  
Delsin frowns, cups a hand to his ear. “Sorry, sorry, surely I’m not hearing you correctly- what was that again?”  
  
“I’m not saying it again, Del.”  
  
Delsin snorts, lifting himself and rolling gingerly to face Reggie. “Oh come on, throw me a bone, it’s not, uh…” He grimaces, squeezing his eyes shut and curling in on himself. “Shit.”  
  
“You okay?”  
  
“Remember when you were sixteen, and you got that really bad sinus infection that screwed up your ears and made you dizzy whenever you stood up? Imagine having that when you’re lying down and not even _moving_.”  
  
Reggie remembers that week vividly- it _sucked_. “They have you on anything?”  
  
“Some pain stuff. Not much else they can do for the head right now. They’re monitoring it.”  
  
“Huh.” Reggie reaches over and lightly pats Delsin on the arm. “I’m sure you’ll be fine. You’re young, you’ll snap back quick and be back to vandalizing gang-owned properties in no time.”  
  
Delsin’s eyes fly open, full of mischief despite his discomfort. “Is that approval I hear?”  
  
“No,” Reggie says quickly, stricken. “Do not vandalize things. Do not tag things. I don’t care if it’s in Salmon Bay or Seattle, _do not violate the law._”  
  
“Too late, I heard an endorsement!”  
  
“_No_, Delsin!”  
  
His brother is going to be the death of him, that much Reggie is certain of.  
  
-End


End file.
